Torch Singer is a brisk, highly entertaining woman's film with a superb performance from Claudette Colbert. Her tour de force goes a long way in overcoming the inherent craziness of the plot. Pregnant and unmarried, she arrives at the outset at a hospital charity ward, where she stays to have her baby. The father, we learn, is a rich playboy who has gone off to China and is impossible to reach. Colbert is determined to somehow raise the child herself, and she does make a go of it, sharing a New York apartment with another new mother she befriends at the hospital, played by Lyda Roberti. Roberti works while Colbert looks after the babies, but before too long Roberti moves away and gets married. On her own, Colbert simply can't manage to find work while caring for a baby, and after she is refused financial help by her playboy-lover's family, she reluctantly gives up her daughter for adoption, with these parting words: "Don't let any man make a sucker out of you. Make 'em know what you're worth. Anything they get for nothing is always cheap."
Then, pretty much instantaneously, the newly toughened Colbert becomes a nightclub singer, moving from hole-in-the-wall joints up to classier clubs. She meets cute with Ricardo Cortez in a charming sequence involving a non-functioning telephone, and before we know it, Colbert's stunning white gown has become a sexy, low-cut black number, her lifestyle has zoomed up several tax brackets, and she has become the most successful and notorious torch singer in town. (The movie makes this seem as if it's on the level of prostitution.)
Through plot contrivances involving Cortez, Colbert eventually finds herself as a children's radio host, "Aunt Jenny," who speaks and sings sweetly to children over the airwaves. Pining for the daughter she gave up a few years earlier, she realizes the radio show might be a swell way to track the girl down. But then the father (David Manners) of said daughter returns from China, adding more complications. The fact that Torch Singer moves quickly keeps the absurdity of the story from feeling that way, and Colbert carries the picture so well that it's a wonder she didn't get more roles like this.
She looks fantastically glamorous in one outfit after another and sings well in the scenes that require it, showing off not only her own voice but also body movements and a sexy style that is totally appropriate to those scenes. Contrast that to the first-rate scene in which she reunites with Manners, displaying a complexity of emotion over his return that is believable and very sympathetic. And Colbert is also quite a sight in her hospital bed early on, meeting her newborn girl for the first time, kissing her lovingly while declaring, "Why couldn't you have been a boy? This world's such a tough place for a girl to come into." Never mind that Colbert also looks amazing in lipstick and eyeliner here; of course it's silly that she'd look like this in her hospital bed, but such are the pleasures of watching a studio-era melodrama. If one can look beyond such superficialities, one will find a very fine performance.
Torch Singer suffers from an unsatisfactory, out-of-nowhere ending, but then again the whole movie is so preposterous that one can't really complain. The film is not particularly salacious for a pre-Coder, but its frank and sympathetic depiction of an unwed pregnant woman was indeed a no-no in the Production Code that would start to be enforced in mid-1934. Torch Singer has something of the grittiness of a Warner Brothers film of the time, but it is mixed in with glossy sets and costumes that were Paramount's stock in trade.
Unwed-mother stories were extremely popular in the pre-Code era, and as Jeanine Basinger has written in A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (Knopf, 1993), such plots provided a way for mothers in the audience to experience freedom from motherhood: "A woman on film who sacrifices a child suffers and is ultimately punished, reassuring the women watching. At the same time, the woman on film who gives up a child suddenly has freedom. Often, she finds a better life of riches, success, adventure, and, in the end, even an opportunity for love with another man or the same man who caused her problem in the first place. The viewer could watch a woman get free of the burden of mothering without having to feel guilty about it." Characters like Colbert's in Torch Singer, Basinger muses, abandon the role of motherhood in order to accomplish it. The supporting cast is a good one including Charles Grapewin and Lyda Roberti, a sexy Polish actress whose career was cut short when she died in 1938 of a heart attack. (She was only 31.) Her character in Torch Singer leaves the movie too early and is missed. Director Alexander Hall, who shares credit with George Somnes, was an underrated filmmaker who brought a pleasingly light touch to movies like The Amazing Mr. Williams (1939), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and My Sister Eileen (1942) among others.
Universal Home Entertainment has included in this set, which is entitled simply Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, a physical reproduction of the Production Code itself as well as a 10-minute featurette on the pre-Code era. There are no other extras save for brief liner notes. Picture and sound are excellent, and the physical packaging is quite attractively designed.
Torch Singer, visit Universal Home Entertainment. To order Torch Singer (It is only available as part of the Pre-Code Hollywood set from Universal), go to TCM Shopping.
by Jeremy Arnold
